The marriage plot was integral to the emergent middle-class novel. Consider how the pursuit of a spouse drives Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) or that the disappointments of married life shape George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871). Our middle-class culture, in contrast, is organized around the trauma plot, stories in which a person’s behavior, identity, or relationships are understood through the lens of a formative past trauma. Narratives of personal suffering are everywhere, from memoirs (Tara Westover’s Educated) to novels (Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine) to television (True Detective) to film (Manchester by the Sea), and more.

For Catherine Liu, professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, the trauma plot has deep roots and weighty political consequences. In her new book, Traumatized, Liu argues that, by treating poverty, overwork, and insecurity as individual and private traumas to be overcome via self-help, therapy, and corporate wellness, capitalism transforms the psychological wounds of exploitation into profitable and commoditized stories, shifting responsibility onto workers. The stakes are high: For Liu, the subjective and emotional trauma plot is not only a “tool of social control” that represses working-class politics and class analysis, it is a grand narrative that has destroyed our “responsibility to reason” about “an objectively shared material reality and history.”

The marriage plot was integral to the emergent middle-class novel. Consider how the pursuit of a spouse drives Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) or that the disappointments of married life shape George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871). Our middle-class culture, in contrast, is organized around the trauma plot, stories in which a person’s behavior, identity, or relationships are understood through the lens of a formative past trauma. Narratives of personal suffering are everywhere, from memoirs (Tara Westover’s Educated) to novels (Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine) to television (True Detective) to film (Manchester by the Sea), and more.

Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, by Catherine Liu, Verso, 192 pp., $24.95, September 2026

For Catherine Liu, professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, the trauma plot has deep roots and weighty political consequences. In her new book, Traumatized, Liu argues that, by treating poverty, overwork, and insecurity as individual and private traumas to be overcome via self-help, therapy, and corporate wellness, capitalism transforms the psychological wounds of exploitation into profitable and commoditized stories, shifting responsibility onto workers. The stakes are high: For Liu, the subjective and emotional trauma plot is not only a “tool of social control” that represses working-class politics and class analysis, it is a grand narrative that has destroyed our “responsibility to reason” about “an objectively shared material reality and history.”

Flying in the face of postmodern theories of social class as obsolete, Traumatized is a bold Marxist critique: Liu deconstructs “the ideological mystification of suffering that trauma discourse and trauma studies provide in order to promote liberalism’s foreclosure of collective possibilities for health and healing.” Importantly, Liu’s overall goal is “not to correct the definition of trauma as a psychiatric........

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